"A deeply moving, very clear novel about a femicide - but at the same time a book about moving on." NDR Book of the Month

Nine-year-old Maja grows up in a dysfunctional family - a tyrannical father, a loving but repressed mother, in between a lot of silence and things that nobody explains to her. When Frank, Maja's father, kills her mother, he tears a hole in the world - for Maja, but also for everyone else who is left behind.
From one moment to the next, nothing is as it was: between grief, custody battles and bureaucracy, Maja becomes a pawn and loses her family, her home, her sense of security and the certainty of who she belongs to in the midst of applications and responsibilities.
Her godmother Liv becomes Maja's only ray of hope: Liv works as an astrophysicist and gets Maja excited about the wonders of the universe. At the same time, she struggles with her own insecurities, old fears and the excessive demands of suddenly having to take on responsibility. And yet Liv and Maja grow together: looking through the telescope and trying to find answers in endless space that no one else can give them.

A novel about the echo of violence, about structural failure - and about how a community is shaken when a femicide shatters everything. Told from several perspectives, the panorama unfolds of a family in a state of emergency and a society that still avoids the structural core of violence.

Jasmin Schreiber, born in Frankfurt/Main in 1988, is a biologist and writer. When she's not crawling through a bog to find short-winged beetles for her research, she writes her way onto the bestseller list and tells stories from science and nature on the podcast Bugtales.fm. Eichborn has published the novels MARIANENGRABEN, DER MAUERSEGLER, and ENDLING, as well as the non-fiction book SCHREIBERS NATURARIUM, which was named Science Book of the Year 2023. Jasmin Schreiber lives in Hamburg with her husband and three dogs. You can find her on Instagram at @lavievagabonde.

Moderation: Julia Maronde